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Over the last forty-five years in the western world, various groups that were previously disenfranchised and suppressed have challenged the existing social order and demanded equal rights, opportunities, freedoms, and benefits. In particular the women's movement has raised the consciousness of society and has pressed all sectors of the academic and professional communities concerned with human psychology to re-examine their theories relating to personality development, psychopathology, and treatment. Psychoanalysis has been challenged to rethink its most basic hypotheses and theoretical formulations in the light of male-female differences. As male and female children grow up in families and in cultures which continue to hold very different expectations and beliefs about the sexes, very different outcomes result from the internalization of experience. Men traditionally are socialized to value autonomy and power, while women traditionally are socialized to value containment and interpersonal relationships.
The three papers in this special section present new ideas about the psychology of women derived from psychoanalytic data collected from the analyses of female patients. Benjamin focuses attention on the difference between object love and identificatory love. She asks us to consider that the developing female child must identify with both father and mother in order to achieve necessary personality functions. Identification with father leads to a sense of agency, independence, and individuation, while identification with mother leads to a sense of being and containing The developing child requires both sets of